Friday, August 15, 2014

It’s Becoming

Portrait of Hegel by Jakob Schlesinger

What the mathematician John Allen Paulos (Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences) doesn’t take into
consideration in his recent Science Times
piece “The Advanced Metrics of Attraction” (NYT, 7/14/14) is the power of
non-existence. Taking inspiration from Alain de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life), who has apparently been opining on
crushes, Paulos attempts to accommodate Nobel prize economist Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) and Baye’s
theorem, which he describes as “a mathematical proposition that tells us how to
update our estimates of people, events and situations in the light of new
evidence." Paulos quotes Kahneman in describing two
kinds of thinking, System I which is “fast, automatic, frequent, emotional,
stereotypic and subconscious” and System 2 which is “slow, effortful,
infrequent, logical, calculating and conscious.” But actually the kind of
crushes that have you falling in love with women or men who you’ve seen through
a crack in a blind, or at the moment the doors of a subway car are closing are the essence of the romantic agony. Young Werther knew all about such
infatuation, which really represents the triumph of imagination over reality.
How can something which is known all too well and is defined by its finitude
compare with that which has yet to be and which represents infinite
possibility? Intuitive versus logical learning and statistics aside, doesn’t
the truth about love really go back to metaphysics? Hegel had it right when he
distinguished between being and becoming. And when it comes to passion being is
always going to play second fiddle to that which has yet to be.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.